The possibility of connecting the Commodore 64 to an Ethernet local
area network has been a collective dream in the Commodore community
for decades. A C64 Ethernet adapter would make it possible to connect
the C64 directly to the Internet, making it possible to download
software, transfer data to and from the C64, play network games over
the Internet; the possibilities are endless.

With our TFE cartridge (The Final Ethernet cartridge) this is now
possible.

TFE - The Final Ethernet

The TFE cartridge is designed around Systor Vest AS' CS8900a-based Embedded Ethernet
board. The board is mounted on a circuit board which contains a single
74LS139 chip that constitutes the glue logic between the C64 and the
Ethernet chip. More information including the full schematics and
pictures of the hardware can be found here.

The C64 real-time streaming audio
server is an example of the kind of abilities that Ethernet brings
to the C64. We have connected an unexpanded Commodore 64 equipped with
our TFE cartridge and a standard Datasette player to the Internet. The
Commodore 64 runs a web server and a real-time streaming audio
server. The audio server is streaming real-time Internet streaming
audio sampled from the casette in the Datasette player. The audio is
sampled in 2000 Hz using the 1-bit built-in casette sampler of the
C64. More information including the full source code for the web- and
real-time streaming audio server can be found here.

Authors

The hardware was designed and realized by Peter Eliasson
<petere@lsil.com>. The software was written by Adam Dunkels
<adam@dunkels.com>.

History

The idea of building an Ethernet adapter for the C64 was concieved by
Peter numerous years ago, but it was not until recently that we had
the necessary competence to actually build the hardware and write the
software for this project. With Adam's uIP TCP/IP stack, we now had
what we needed for completing the TFE project.

Over one of the many lunches where TFE has been discussed and planned,
Peter mentioned that it would be cool to, in addition to serve web
pages, be able to play streaming audio from the C64. Although that
sounded quite unlikely at first, it turns out that it indeed was
possible to both serve web pages and run a real-time streaming audio
server.

$Date: 2002/10/17 19:25:07 $

Latest News

2003-09-13Jens
Schönfeld has made another production run of the RetroReplay
cartridge together with the RR-Net Ethernet cards! See his
announcement for details and some pictures of the hardware. The
RR-Net kits are distributed with a version of Contiki on a 5.25"
disk.

2003-06-02Jens Schönfeld
have announced that he will manufacture and sell C64 Ethernet cards
for the RetroReplay cartridge! The
cards will be available at the end of the summer for 50 EUR. A Contiki
driver is already written and have been tested with the card!